Building out in the open

For as long as I can remember, I’ve always had wild ideas and tiny projects on the go?—?but I’ve built it all in private. Here’s why that’s a bad thing.

TLDR: Building in private can introduce cognitive biases and flawed feedback loops that make for troublesome projects. Building in the open can not only garner better feedback, but avoid the heartache of failure. For me, nobody has pushed me to demo or complete any of my private ideas. Perhaps if I make them public, it'll force me to actually finish them.

A little background

Way back in 2009 I began my computer animation program at Sheridan. There was, of course, the important animation theory, history, and industry lessons galore, but my first vivid memory was to take what we’d learned about Autodesk Maya, and make a 3D chair. Any chair. Make it as simple or complex as you wish?—?and you’d be showing it to the broader class as soon the allotted time was up.

No stranger to critique or demonstrating my work, the years prior in graphic design school had prepared a thick skin for the knife-like eyes of my classmates, the sharp tongue of my professor, and the shame of?maybe that wasn’t the right layout choice.?Except… it wasn’t like that at all in computer animation.?

The shift in atmosphere was a breath of fresh air; one of technical support, encouragement, and camaraderie. I think that first week set the tone for the entire group of us. We built our projects openly among our peers, proudly displayed whatever results we came up with, and shared what we thought were best practices with one another.

Of course, graphic design school wasn't entirely creating in isolation. Projects had milestones and points for feedback, I worked among my peers, ran ideas past them, and when we began using computers in 2nd year (yeah, it was that long ago) whatever you worked on was on full display. Yet, I still felt the need to hold back my work until it was in a presentable state.

The difference between my time in graphic design vs computer animation was building in private vs building in the open.

Can you see Macho Man’s feet sliding? I didn’t but my classmates did.

You can’t build in a black box

Way too many of my early projects after school were spent squirrelled away trying to present the most perfect result. When I presented those works, I hated the feedback.?How could they say that?! They don’t understand what this is about! I already tried that!?The emotional maturity of a puppy. My immediate action in those days was to hoard my ideas, hunch over them to protect the reveal, then?tada!?present the results to my own self-inflicted disappointment.

I learned the hard way to be transparent from the start, and draw boundaries around expectations to greatly increase the likelihood that I wasn’t going to have someone come in and dropkick the whole thing.?This is why context is key. People aren't going to understand where you started, how you got there, and where you're going unless they were there from the beginning. There are very few times where you can pull a rabbit out of a hat.

As such, my most successful projects were not ones done in isolation. Building in the open provided constant context for those who would provide feedback. If they are coming in fresh, and they are going to give you feedback, you’re going to have a bad time.

The curse of knowledge

To pull any rabbits from anywhere, you have to understand the mindset and existing knowledge of the people that are going to consume or critique your work. Consider:

• When someone sees your work, have they been with you every step of the way??Or are they just stumbling past it?
• Is there some critical knowledge required to understand the state of your thing? Or are they going to be making assumptions?
• Are they aware of things you’ve already considered? Or will you provide information to enable effective feedback?
• Are they involved enough to understand where you’re going with it? Or do they need guidance?

Understanding that not everyone knows the ins and outs of what you’re working on took me embarrassingly too long to figure out. In the end, this all boils down to one of the most crucial cognitive biases to avoid in communication:?the curse of knowledge.

The curse of knowledge happens when one person is trying to communicate something to another person, the communicator wrongly assumes the other person has background knowledge of the thing that’s being communicated. This understandably ends in confusion.

Far too often things are built in a way the creator intimately understands how it all works and what it's for. Because of this, important cues or information is left out that can help guide those who are using it.

Curse of knowledge happens because things are built in private. Things built in private (even by teams or?whole companies) take on the biases of the people that create them?— without fresh eyes, and without critical external feedback. Those who rely on hunches, on gut, on experience or hubris will find themselves with projects that fail, products that break, research that's biased, music that sucks, art that’s cringey, or in the worst case, people that get hurt.

Building in the open is not going to solve all your problems, but it does provide avenues to learn from the people that might just be stumbling past.

Shawn's journey to build in the open

To this point, I have only 'built in the open' in my professional career. Even then, some of the open building was done in ways that were meant to preserve the confidentiality of the client. It’s not easy, but it’s not impossible. Perhaps more on that in another post.

For my personal projects, all of it is private. I have over time convinced myself that they’re just little ideas that I’ll someday turn into real projects, but they never get off the ground and because of that, they never see the light of day.?

So as a test this year, I plan to start showing some of the things I’ve been working on that are in no way even a thing, but could be. They are notes, sketches, lots of UI, a couple working prototypes, 3D spaces, music, and non-software ideas. I want to get public feedback. I want to test building in the open on my personal projects.

The first of my projects is an?interactive 3D maze?set to one of my Sentient Spaces tracks. Right now it’s rough (really rough!) but I’m still learning Unity and trying to gain back all the knowledge I had of computer animation more than a decade ago.

I also want to provide a kind of status dashboard that is updated as I work through these projects. You can find it on my personal website shawncole.com. It'll serve as a reminder that I'm not just toiling away in obscurity or occupied with my own thoughts, but that I'm openly thinking, doing and participating along with anyone who might be interested. Perhaps even those who might be interested in collaboration.

If you made it this far, thank you. This is as much advice for anyone who needs to hear it as it is an admission of my own insular habits. I hope by opening up, I can learn, connect and share with others doing the same.?

Cheers and happy new year!

Original article at https://www.shawncole.com/posts/building-out-in-the-open